1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, and a storage medium and, more particularly, to an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, and a storage medium which are suitable in case of performing a prevention of a color deviation or the like in a printer such as a color laser beam printer.
2. Related Background Art
In recent years, page printers mainly including a laser beam printer have rapidly been developed. Further, recently, a number of page printers which can output a color image have also been proposed and put into practical use as products. A color laser beam printer forms a full color image by overlaying toner of four colors (Y: yellow, M: magenta, C: cyan, K: black) by a well-known electrophotographing process. Various processes to realize such a full color image have been proposed.
Among them, for example, as shown in FIG. 23, there is an intermediate transfer system such that a toner image is formed from a latent image on a photosensitive drum, the toner image is once transferred onto an intermediate transfer member, and toner images of four colors are overlaid onto the intermediate transfer member, and after that, the toner images of four colors are transferred in a lump onto a paper and fixed, thereby forming an image. According to the intermediate transfer system, since the intermediate transfer member is physically fixed, there is an advantage such that a color deviation of four colors can be prevented easier as compared with the case of a system for transferring the toner images one color by one onto the paper.
There is also an advantage such that since it is sufficient to transfer the toner images onto the paper only once, a path of a paper can be formed in a straight line and the toner images can be easily transferred onto a medium such as OHP, thick paper, or the like which is difficult to be wrapped around the transfer drum.
FIGS. 24A and 24B are diagrams showing the relation between the intermediate transfer member and a paper size in the image forming apparatus shown in FIG. 23. FIG. 24A corresponds to a case where an image is formed onto the whole surface of the intermediate transfer member. FIG. 24B corresponds to a case where an image is formed onto a part of the intermediate transfer member.
As shown in FIGS. 24A and 24B, the image forming method of the intermediate transfer system has a problem such that the intermediate transfer member with the size corresponding to the maximum paper size is necessary. In case of forming an image on a page unit basis, even in case of the printing of any size, the maximum number of print copies per minute cannot be set to be larger than that corresponding to the maximum paper size.
The invention is made in consideration of the above problems and it is an object of the invention to provide an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, and a storage medium which can maximize a print throughput of the intermediate transfer system.
To accomplish the above object, according to the invention of claim 1, there is provided an image forming apparatus comprising: image forming means which can form images of a plurality of pages based on print data received from an external apparatus in an image forming area; predicting means for calculating prediction information, on a page unit basis, to predict a development processing time to develop intermediate data based on the print data to a bit map image; and control means for switching a first forming mode to form an image of one page by the image forming means and a second forming mode to form images of a plurality of pages by the image forming means on the basis of the prediction information which is calculated by the predicting means, thereby allowing an image formation to be performed.
To accomplish the above object, according to the invention, there is provided an image forming apparatus comprising: image forming means which can form images of a plurality of pages based on print data received from an external apparatus to an image forming area; predicting means for calculating prediction information, on a page unit basis, to predict a development processing time for developing intermediate data based on the print data to a bit map image; and control means for switching a first forming mode to output a signal to request an image formation after completion of a development of a band in which a development processing time of the band is later than an image formation processing speed in the image forming means and a second forming mode to start the development of the band in which the development processing time of the band is later than the image formation processing speed in the image forming means after the signal to request the image formation was outputted on the basis of the prediction information calculated by the predicting means, thereby allowing an image formation to be performed.
To accomplish the above object, the image forming apparatus is accomplished by an image forming method and a computer-readable storage medium which stores a program for realizing such a method.